Yes, I’m Cissy Bales

Yes, I locked up Guilt in the north barn stall.
Yes, I nailed a 2×4 across the latch
and tacked up rusty barbed wire.
Understand me. She arrived scratched
and naked, claiming she’d been raped,
her money gone on drugs. She claimed
she had no one but me.

She prefers going almost bare-assed.
I can’t stand her filthy hands,
bony butt and stringy hair. I gave
her wool socks, panties and a bra, red leather
boots, a velvet cape, a brush — no one else
has ever been so good. She says so!

She sat at my kitchen window watching
the level of my gin bottle — and looking
for bad guys out to get even.
She weighs my trash and hisses
at my cat. Her you’re-screwing-up mantra
points blame eight times. She hums like a cello
that bites and gripes in my bad ear at night.
She curdles my dreams. She claims I owe her
a hide-out. When I try to move her,
she vanishes — from that small stall.
Where to? Under the saddle blankets,
into the hay. Out of the way. I don’t know!

She needs little, impossibly little.
Yes, she nibbles fallen oats
like a rat at chicken scratch.
She licks drips from the eaves
and bathes in the goat trough.

I don’t know where Guilt is now,
how you heard she’s here,
or when she’s coming back.

Please understand.
This is NOT elder abuse. I’m doing
what any normal person would do.

An Vermont poet with a deep love for writing haiku, poetry with feminist and eco themes. Ocean's Laughter (Aldrich Press 2016) combines lyric and eco-poetry to look at change over time in a small town on Oregon's north coast. Urban Wild (a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, 2014) highlights how people and wildlife interact in urban habitat. Broadfork Farm (The Poetry Box) is love poetry for a the creatures and people of a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington. In 2018 Antrim House released How I Learned To Be White -- the poetry of introspection into white privilege and Knoll's work to live more fully in a multicultural world. How I Learned To Be White received the Gold Prize for Poetry Book Category for Motivational Poetry in the Human Relations Indie Book Prize for 2018. Website: triciaknoll.com